How the SPD was rebuilt after the war

On April 19, 1945, Kurt Schumacher and other Social Democrats in Hanover decided to rebuild the SPD. The first party books were handed out in May without the consent of the occupiers. Schumacher is later elected chairman.

At the beginning of May 1945, war was still raging in many places in Germany. But a number of cities have already capitulated. On April 30, soldiers of the Red Army hoisted the Soviet flag at the Berlin Reichstag, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery. A good 270 kilometers further west, in Hanover, the NSDAP, Gestapo and Wehrmacht no longer have a say. On April 10, the Americans had taken the city by a surprise attack. The British army reached the city immediately after the US troops. On April 11, the British city commander appoints 66-year-old Gustav Bratke, who was already an SPD politician before 1933, as a new mayor for Hanover.

Reconstruction of the SPD is in the offing

At this time, Hanover was a city badly damaged by countless air raids. The old Hanover, the inner city, is 90 percent destroyed. Lord Mayor Bratke is to take care of the reconstruction of the city under the supervision of the British military. But further reconstruction is in the offing - initially in the background. Although the one-party rule of the NSDAP in Hanover has already ended, there are no other parties either. The Nazi regime banned them in 1933. And at this point in time, the British occupying power is not making any moves to allow political parties again.

Schumacher's early resistance to the Nazi regime

Kurt Schumacher, a member of the SPD since 1918 and a member of the German Reichstag between 1930 and 1933, took a strikingly critical and sharp stance on the NSDAP in his speeches in the early 1930s and thus became the enemy of the Nazi officials. After the National Socialists took power, Schumacher was arrested and spent the next ten years almost continuously in various concentration camps, including Neuengamme. Seriously ill and marked, he landed in Hanover in 1943 - and shortly after the British invasion began to pick up and pull together the social-democratic threads in the city.

Hanover as the nucleus of the new SPD

According to a joint resolution of April 19, 1945, around 130 Social Democrats meet in the meeting room of the police headquarters in Hanover on May 6 and elect a provisional party executive. On the same day, almost twelve years after the SPD was banned, the "Büro Dr. Schumacher" opened in Hanover-Linden. Although still prohibited by the British, the first party books will soon be handed out here. After the occupying power allowed the SPD to enter their zone in the summer, Schumacher officially applied for the party to be re-established in Hanover on August 20.

Official SPD re-establishment in October 1945 in Wennigsen

From October 5 to 7, 1945, SPD functionaries meet in Wennigsen to re-establish the party. Schumacher is elected political officer for the western zones of occupation and put in charge of party reconstruction.

Schumacher becomes chairman with 244 of 245 votes

The first post-war party conference of the SPD takes place from May 9 to 11, 1946 in the hall of the Hanomag works in Hanover-Linden. Kurt Schumacher opens the event and earns enthusiastic applause and shouts of bravo for his speech:

"I don't want to talk to you at this hour with the booming pathos of propaganda that you have had to endure in the last 13 years. [...] We don't want to make big gestures, we don't want politics of persuasion and coercion. We want a policy that is carried out by women and men out of free knowledge and of their own free will."Excerpt from the opening speech by Kurt Schumacher, Hanover, May 9, 1946

For three days, the comrades debate honoring the victims of fascism, denazification, socialist economic policy and the tasks and goals of German social democracy and decide to set up a party program committee.

Schumacher is finally elected party leader in the three western occupation zones - with 244 out of 245 votes. As the social-democratic opponent of Konrad Adenauer, Schumacher was repeatedly confirmed as the leading figure of the SPD in the years that followed and as party chairman until his death in 1952.

Schumacher:A stroke of luck for the SPD and for Hanover

In retrospect, social scientist Stephan Klecha sees the fact that Schumacher was released to Hanover of all places after years of imprisonment in a concentration camp as a result of some fortunate circumstances for the SPD. Klecha, a board member in the SPD district of Hanover and a lecturer in political science at the University of Göttingen, says that the Hanoverian SPD would probably not have been able to expand and consolidate its role in the city to such an extent if Schumacher had not re-established the party there. The party provided the mayor for a full 73 years.

Hannover-Linden:center of the working class with radiance

"It is also not entirely unimportant that before 1933 Hanover was the seat of the factory workers' association, the forerunner of the IG mining, chemicals and energy," says Klecha. Above all, the "red" Linden was considered one of the centers of the working class - far beyond the borders of Hanover. "Linden was definitely one of the places in Germany where social democracy - namely its reformist part - was very firmly anchored and from which the SPD largely draws to this day. Both in terms of myth and to a certain extent form of organizational understanding", according to Klecha.

"SPD functioned incredibly quickly as an organization"

In the spring of 1945, the organization and structures of the party and the country were still in ruins. "But above all the social democracy, one must not forget that, stood again in 1945," emphasizes Klecha. "As an organization, the SPD functioned incredibly quickly in 1945/46. Also because in Schumacher they had a leader who also deeply embodied this."

The "Büro Dr. Schumacher" later moves from Linden to Odeonstrasse in the devastated city center of Hanover, where it becomes the party headquarters of the federal SPD. It was not until 1951 that the SPD headquarters were relocated to Bonn, the new capital. Today, the office of the SPD Region Hannover is located in the Kurt-Schumacher-Haus on Odeonstraße. The office of mayor has been held by a Green since 2019, Belit Onay.